Q1: What is the HTRC?

A: The HTRC is the research arm of the HathiTrust. It facilitates scholarly research using the large-scale HathiTrust Digital Library by providing mechanisms for researchers to access content in the HathiTrust and study it using computational tools for text analysis.

The HTRC is a partnership between Indiana University (IU) Libraries, the Pervasive Technology Institute, and the School of Informatics and Computing at IU, as well as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Libraries and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC.

Q2: What are the HTRC tools and services?

A: The HTRC has created a suite of tools that allow researchers to perform text analysis on content in the HathiTrust Digital Library. These tools include the Portal and Workset Builder, HathiTrust+Bookworm, and the HTRC Data Capsule. They are intended to meet the needs of various HTRC researchers.

Q4: Do I need an account to use the HTRC and how do I make one?

A: Most of the HTRC services require an account to log in and interact with the tools, though HathiTrust+Bookworm is available without an account.

Register for an account by going to the main page of the Portal and choosing "Sign up" from the menu. Anyone possessing an email address from a nonprofit institution of higher education is allowed to register, including those whose institutions are not HathiTrust members.

Q5: What is the difference between using the HTRC and searching the HathiTrust Digital Library?

A: Using the search bar on the hathitrust.org site allows you to find digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library and to read them if they are in the public domain. With the HTRC tools you can instead work with material in the HathiTrust Digital Library at scale, using computational methods to analyze subcollections of content relevant to your research.

Q6: What types of data and metadata does HTRC provide?

A: HTRC currently provides access to the public domain corpus OCR text from the HathiTrust, as well as each volume’s MARC bibliographic and METS metadata.